In terms of teeming slithering creatures packing nasty bites, Wall Street could easily outdo Galveston after Hurricane Ike.

But appreciate the avaricious atmosphere or not (I worked as a paper-pusher on the Street early in my career), the money in our pockets (or fading from our 401(k)s) has a clear trail through the land of platinum parachutes.

So as the fiscal swamp hit the fan in recent days, I was struck by the irony in something that futurist Ian Morrison said at a presentation last week in San Francisco. "We are all one job change away from medical oblivion," he told an annual hospital council confab.

Forget the old joke "what do you call 100 stock brokers at the bottom of the Everglades?" Thousands are losing jobs, insurance, their homes -- and a goodly number are regular folks, not buyers of Bugatti Veyron's (about $2 Mil).

Which leads me to a feature story in HealthLeaders September issue -- a "what if" story about potential monumental shifts in health care. The  questions include:

• What if the number of uninsured hit 75 million? (Current numbers are 45-47 million)
• What if safety-net hospitals start to fail? (Duh, they already are. Fortunately, Community Medical Centers has been able to keep its ahead above water in recent years.)
• What if we find a bug worse than MRSA? (methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus, or MRSA, was once a rare, life-threatening infection, but no longer.)

But my favorite question is "What if they find a way to ....." heal the blind, or  provide some kind of regenerative medicine to turn a bad switch off and reignite a life-saving one?

Much better to wonder on that last one, than track Freddie, Fannie, Bear/Stearns, Merrill Lynch.....